STARKVILLE   Press coverage of the presidential campaign has focused more than usual on the outrageous rhetoric of the campaign and the social media reaction that rhetoric engenders.
But the electoral college map is where the real focus should be. Presidential politics remain an exercise in electoral math rather than a passion play tied to political correctness or the lack of it.
The latest Real Clear Politics electoral map with no toss-up states   forecasts an electoral landslide win for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The current projection is 352 votes for Clinton and 176 for GOP opponent Donald Trump.
With toss-ups, the RCP forecast is that Clinton currently has 256 electoral votes to 154 for Trump, leaving Clinton 15 votes shy of the 271 electoral votes needed to claim the White House.
Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com currently shows Clinton with 360 electoral votes to 177 electoral votes for Trump. Or expressed another way, FiveThirtyEight gives Clinton an 84.6 percent chance of winning the election to Trump’s 13.5 percent. Those numbers loom despite presidential popularity polls that show a much closer margin in terms of the nation’s popular vote polls which by RCP’s national average give Clinton 47.7 percent of the vote to Trump’s 41 percent, a spread of 6.7 percent of the vote for the Democrat.
    In all but the closest of elections, there is an almost perpetual debate over the wisdom and reliability of the electoral vote versus the popular vote as a means to choose America’s president. For many Americans, there is a disconnect between their intrinsic belief that the candidate who wins a majority or plurality of the popular vote should win the election and the hard, cold reality that we actually elect presidents in this nation through the electoral vote.
The conventional wisdom on the electoral vote is that it ensures that a U.S. president has sufficient popular support spread drawn from a distribution that is geographically diverse enough to enable the chief executive to be effective in governing. A growing number of people disagree.
    As noted when writing about this topic in the past, opponents of the electoral vote argue that the system favors rural, less populated states like Mississippi over more urban, heavily populated states like California or Florida.
Then there’s the  swing state  argument against the electoral vote. In theory, a candidate would win the presidential election by carrying just 12 states that comprise a winning 283 electoral votes: California (55 votes), Florida (29), Texas (38), New York (29), Illinois (20), Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), Georgia (16), North Carolina (15), New Jersey (14) and Virginia (13).
Should that occur, it would be possible for a president with a significant minority of the popular vote to be elected.
Proponents argue that as a federal coalition of states, the Electoral College’s protection of the voice of rural, less populated states is not a detriment but an advantage. Proponents also argue that the  swing state  argument is bogus in that such a development has never taken place.
But the dominance of the electoral vote versus the popular vote is easy to illustrate. Let’s put it this way. No one whose last name is Clinton has been elected president with a majority of the nation’s popular vote, electoral vote victories were easy to come by.
In 1996, Bill Clinton won a 379 vote electoral landslide but only garnered a 49.2 percent plurality of the popular vote over Republican Bob Dole and independent Ross Perot. In 1992, Clinton took 370 electoral votes with a 43 percent plurality of the vote against Republican George H.W. Bush and Perot.
Bush the Elder won a whopping 426 electoral votes and a 53.4 percent popular vote majority in 1988 while Ronald Reagan grabbed 525 electoral votes and a 58.8 percent popular vote win over Walter Mondale in 1984.
Fast forward to 2008 for an example of how the process really works. In 2008, presidential candidates concentrated over two-thirds of their campaign appearances and advertising spending in just six states and 98 percent in just 15 states —   surprise, surprise — the ones with the most electoral votes.
(Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him sidsalter@sidsalter.com.)